Hipstar

2015 ongoing, hula audiovisual interface

So much of our present image consumption happens while sitting and watching a screen, our bodies static and purely receptive. We're encouraged to vary our visual focal length, or to stretch occasionally. But there's no avoiding the fact that, in the extremely digital present, we are becoming more sedentary.

An accelerometer-enabled hula hoop interface, Hipstar brings the body back, rendering the image-consumer kinetically present.

Hipstar heralds a new type of participatory embodiment in audiovisual and virtual realities; an interface not confined to the face and fingers. 

Hipstar asks people to work their booty to get the images rolling, creating an enlightening, reciprocal bond between body and technology.

Engaging both the nostalgic and contemporary popularity of hula hooping, Hipstar is a joyfully literal take on being a cog in a machine. Thematically, it manifests the (post)human emplacement in the networked image-machine itself, and a critique of the disembodied, minor effort usually spent in consuming digital content. It requires a full-body commitment to confronting our extreme digital consumption practices, and of one's actual emplacement and complicity in the image-scape.

Hipstar (first called Gyrated) is in development since 2015. To date it has been exhibited experimentally, with our original video PG: Power Generator, at:

​Exhibitions
Stacks and Sleeves, Gallery Lane Cove, Sydney 2019
Video Vortex XI, Srishti Outpost, collateral of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala India 2017
Perspectives, Sight(Site) Uncovered, The Galeries, VIVID Sydney 2016
FemFlix: Contemporary Art and Feminism, SCA Galleries, Sydney 2016
Beyond Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, UNSW Galleries, Sydney 2015 (prototype, shown as PG: Power Generator)

Links
Video from Stacks and Sleeves, Gallery Lane Cove
Video from The Mill Hall, Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Catalogue for Video Vortex XI